How Brexit Will Be Reversed: A Guide to the Inevitable
Chapter 2: Life Before Brexit Became Brexit
The parliament that lasted for five years between May 2010 and May 2015 was a fascinating one from a Brexit perspective. Looking back on it, a lot of the signs were there that leaving the EU was much more on the cards than anyone at the time was talking about in newspapers or on television. I was at the coalface of it, organising a lot of EU related events, so I should have known better. Somehow, I always thought Remain would prevail, which I see now was naivety on my part.
There is an anecdote Dan Hannan likes to share every once in a while about how he called up Conservative Campaign Headquarters in 2009 to say he was going to dedicate himself to campaigning to get the UK leave the European Union - and they laughed down the phone at him. That’s how ridiculous that level of Euroscepticism felt, only seven years before we voted to leave, even to people who worked at the heart of the Conservative Party.
It's also an apt demonstration of how quickly Euroscepticism on the right evolved. If you go back to the 2000s, all it took to be someone who was amongst the most Eurosceptic on the right was to believe Britain taking the Euro would be a disaster and that we had to figure out a way to avoid “ever closer union”. Almost no one ever talked about actually leaving the EU and if they ever strayed onto that territory even a little, they would always caveat this by saying of course we would never, ever leave the single market because only a madman would ever consider doing such a thing.
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